Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communication, and more particularly, to a method and a device for acquiring uplink synchronization in consideration of the effect of beamforming in a wireless communication system.
Related Art
3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long-term evolution (LTE) is a technology for enabling high-speed packet communications. Many schemes have been proposed for the LTE objective including those that aim to reduce user and provider costs, improve service quality, and expand and improve coverage and system capacity. The 3GPP LTE requires reduced cost per bit, increased service availability, flexible use of a frequency band, a simple structure, an open interface, and adequate power consumption of a terminal as an upper-level requirement.
As a way to improve the efficiency of limited resources, so-called multi-antenna technology is being actively developed which achieves diversity gain by putting multiple antennas on the transmitter and receiver to cover more spatial regions for resource utilization, and which increases transmission capacity by transmitting data in parallel through each antenna. Multi-antenna technology may employ beamforming and/or precoding to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In closed-loop systems that can use feedback information at the transmitting end, beamforming and/or precoding may be used to maximize SNR through such feedback information. Beamforming is broadly classified into analog beamforming and digital beamforming.
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a multi-antenna technology in which tens of antennas or even more, which is a lot more than now, are put into a base station to achieve higher data rates and higher energy efficiency. When conventional analog beamforming and/or digital beamforming is directly used in massive MIMO, signal processing and/or hardware implementation can get very complex, or the performance increase through the use of multiple antennas is only slight and the flexibility of resource allocation may be reduced. Consequently, the use of hybrid beamforming, a combination of conventional analog and digital beamforming, in massive MIMO is under discussion.
Recently, due to the rapid spread of mobile smart devices and the emergence of big data, mobile traffic is expected to be doubled every year and increased more than 1000 times in 10 years. The burden of mobile network operators have been increased due to the explosion of mobile traffic, and existing 4G mobile communication systems with limited additional frequency coverage cannot accommodate the explosive mobile traffic. Therefore, the development of 5th generation mobile communication technology based on millimeter wave (mmWave) capable of securing broadband is being discussed. The millimeter wave is a frequency band of 30-300 GHz which is generally called extremely high frequency (EHF) band and has its wavelength of 1 cm to 1 mm. The wave with the wavelength is in the middle of the currently used radio frequency band and the infrared ray (its wavelength about 0.1 mm), and it is very close to the light and is used in high resolution radar and microwave spectroscopy. The millimeter wave has less diffraction properties and larger directive properties than the conventional communication wave, and has larger diffraction properties, and less directive properties than the laser beam. When millimeter waves are used for communication, it is considered that ultra-multiple communications is possible in that far exceeds the microwave communication capacity, but there is large transmission loss in the spatial transmission. This is because the energy absorption by the oxygen and water molecules in the atmosphere is relatively large compared to the existing cellular frequency, resulting in high path loss.
When hybrid beamforming is introduced, individual beams may have different channel characteristics and thus may have different channel delays. Therefore, a method for acquiring uplink synchronization different from a conventional method may be required in consideration of such characteristics.